Erosion of nuance: The quiet thinning of literacy
Your phone auto-corrected “necessary” for probably the hundredth time yesterday, and you realised you didn’t know which letter it doubles anymore. It’s such a small forgetting. Yet small forgetfulness can accumulate. We can easily count the signs; words are shortened, autocorrect saves our dignity regarding our spelling, satire is taken literally, and slang is the old thing before time catches up and it becomes irrelevant. Spelling isn’t really what it’s about, though. Our tolerance for meaning that doesn’t come readily is what’s getting smaller.
Language being transient isn’t new; what’s new is the speed. A phrase is now on the rise, vanishes within a week. “Felt like I needed three context videos to use the internet, just because I was offline during exams,” S.M. Nafis (Senior, CSE) says. Words that were shared across communities for years now are restricted to the weekend, then vanish into the abyss. When “I’m dead” stands for every feeling, words like “wistful” or “resentful” fall out of use, and we lose much of the precision of understanding ourselves. Tone grows fragile too. Now, adding “/s” to our sarcasm is crucial so we can express how we are feeling amongst strangers without getting misunderstood.
Internet language is innovative and playful; linguists always believed it reflects creativity, not deterioration. The loss doesn’t lie in slang itself but in range, when one specific dialect becomes the sole gateway for conveying emotions. Ahona Sayara Chowdhury (Senior, BBS) admits, “I feel like I’m thinking in captions, even when writing an essay.”
For Bangladesh, the question carries weight. In 1952, people sacrificed their lives so Bangla could be spoken and written freely. Today it fades not under force but under convenience.
Perhaps language was always meant to be transient. But some of it is worth holding onto, allowing ourselves to dive into the rich sphere of literature the world has to offer. So the question is not whether we are losing our words. It is this: when did you last find the precise word for exactly what you felt, how did it feel to find it, and how does it feel to know it?
